(Sherrie Levine at Simon Lee)
Not to mention the infiltration of certain forms of cultural capital into emerging markets.
The opacity of Levine’s practice, what at first seemed political eventually dispersing to the desire clouding their surface, the first photo cancelling Levine’s second, leaving it as fetish, its surface, an erotic act of medium. Krauss writing it’s “act of theft, which takes place, so to speak, in front of the surface of Weston’s print” made it impossible to see hers, and others theorized the feeling of third sets of eyes, implying a form of moral stakes in which the viewer really was birthed in a consciousness that signaled the end of edenic ignorance. Levine eventually ditching the overt specificity of appropriation proper, and began rendering unplaceable genericisms and monochromes under the burnish of banal surface, a less cruel and more seductive version of Mosset monochromes, whose destruction of content made their opaqueness a violence, and more like commodity forms, whose reproduction was their content and total-allure of surface their meaning.